Demographic factors are characteristics assigned to age, sex, education, income, marital status, job, religion, birth rate, death rate, family size, and marriage age. Demographics are used by governments, corporations and non-government organizations to learn more about a populations characteristics. Demography studies and measures populations to see if there are any direct impacts on the planning and delivery of health, social care and early years social care services to meet the needs of service users at a local level. The demographic factors can be;
Health needs of the population: the health needs of the population is an important aspect for the local government to know as they need to be able to accommodate for everyone’s needs efficiently. Finding out the health needs of the population helps the government to decide on which areas of health they need to be more focused on. For example, if there is a higher number of obesity in Portsmouth, they will focus on advertising health initiatives (Change4life) to lower the number of obese people.
Age of population: knowledge of the age in a population can help health services decide how much health care they need to provide in the area. For example, if there are more elderly people above 70 years of age living in that area then they would need more health care providers and equipment as they are more prone to health issues.
Disability: can influence the planning in a population as the area needs to be equipped with the right equipment to attend to all their needs. If there are more disabled people in the area, the government/NHS will have to spend more money on equipping the area with health equipment.
Unemployment: the socio-economic status of an area indicates how much health services there needs to be in the area. For example, low income families may have a poor diet due to buying ready meals often so they could get more health issues than people of a higher income. The income of a family has an impact of the diet, housing, exercise, stress levels; these can all increase health needs.

Number of single-parent families: 26% of households with children are living in single-parent families and there are 2 million single-parent families in Britain today. There is an increase in demand for childcare services so there will need to be more pre-schools and nurseries in the area to accommodate all the children.
The number of older people: the average age of life expectancy has risen to 85 years for men and 89 years for women. Over the last 50 years, the average life span has increased by 10 years for a male and 8 years for a female. The UK has more people over the age of 60 than they do under 16 so there needs to be enough health services to accommodate their needs. Older people have a lot more health implications than younger people, so if a town has a lot of elderly people in there will need to be more health services set up. In 1901, there was less than 2 million people over the age of 65. There are now over 9 million over 65's in Britain today1.
Single parent families and teenage pregnancies:
A single parent is a parent who is not living with a spouse or partner and is raising the children by themselves. The number of single parents are increasing; In the UK there are 26% of children living with a single parent and there are 2 million single parents in Britain today, less than 2 percent of single parents are teenagers. The median age of a single parent is 38 years old and 49% of single parents are separated from a marriage or widowed2. It can be extremely hard